FTL Discussion Thread

[ISitOnGnomes]

That's why logistics is good, it gives more design space for balancing stuff. Warp and Starlanes have no range limit by design, The cost of the FTL module in ships is basically identical, their is basically no difference in maintenance costs because of this, and no cost to move a ship.

Some FTL should be 'better' then others, so long as they have a commensurate cost. Asymmetric strategic design needs to include variable costs as an element. In StarCraft you see cheap Zerg units and expensive Protoss, if every unit had to be equal in cost it would be vastly less interesting.

Sure they all have different costs, but they all still have the same modes of travel. All have ground units that are blocked by some terrain, and air units that can ignore that terrain. One may use corvette swarm while the other focuses on BBs, but its not like all the protoss get to teleport wherever they want while the other two are stuck walking.

 

[Riftwalker]

That is the most depressing thought I've seen all day - that a feature which changes how your empire expands and how you play it has no room to be balanced in the design space of Stellaris. It suggests that ethos selections - particularly the three extreme hostiles - may well be next on the chopping block.

I mean like, Zuul can expand, even with a very different method, just as well as Humans can, but in stellaris wormholes > warp > hyperlanes. resource balance is always really bad, because it tends to make it "suck when under funded, but OP when funded" they never actually are balanced, it's just can you survive til it's pay'd off.

ethos selection though, IS balanced, in that they each change how you play greatly, but these gameplay changes don't impact power all that much.

Some FTL should be 'better' then others, so long as they have a commensurate cost. Asymmetric strategic design needs to include variable costs as an element. In StarCraft you see cheap Zerg units and expensive Protoss, if every unit had to be equal in cost it would be vastly less interesting.

like I said, expense tends to be a really bad balancing point, as it's suck until you pay off the issue then you're OP. it's never actually balanced to the game, it;s either Under performing or over performing. You need the movement types to have different opportunity costs to be overall balanced. If hyperlanes could not need to stop on a system each time, then they might have kept up with the other 2, but it seems that your stuff would be impossible to catch at that point.

so logistics wouldn;t have helped, because thematically, warp and wormhole have a much easier time providing for their ships as well.

imo

 

[ImpalerWrG]

Sure they all have different costs, but they all still have the same modes of travel. All have ground units that are blocked by some terrain, and air units that can ignore that terrain. One may use corvette swarm while the other focuses on BBs, but its not like all the protoss get to teleport wherever they want while the other two are stuck walking.

Actually their were more then that, In SC1 you had Zerg Nydus canal which was an instant point-2-point system. In SC2 Protoss DID in fact have a lot of warp options, one was a high tier spell, the other warp-in as at the time a unit is built, their were also 'cliff bypass' units added which were essentially a 3rd kind of movement, Terrans even had a unit that transformed from flying to walking. Your right that all races had access two 'basic' movement types of walk/fly but they tried to create as much additional diversity on top of thouse types to give uniqueness to them.

I mean like, Zuul can expand, even with a very different method, just as well as Humans can, but in stellaris wormholes > warp > hyperlanes. resource balance is always really bad, because it tends to make it "suck when under funded, but OP when funded" they never actually are balanced, it's just can you survive til it's pay'd off.

ethos selection though, IS balanced, in that they each change how you play greatly, but these gameplay changes don't impact power all that much.



like I said, expense tends to be a really bad balancing point, as it's suck until you pay off the issue then you're OP. it's never actually balanced to the game, it;s either Under performing or over performing. You need the movement types to have different opportunity costs to be overall balanced. If hyperlanes could not need to stop on a system each time, then they might have kept up with the other 2, but it seems that your stuff would be impossible to catch at that point.

so logistics wouldn;t have helped, because thematically, warp and wormhole have a much easier time providing for their ships as well.

imo

I said explicitly that opportunity cost is important, that's why I have consistently said FTL movement needs to cost energy. The Faster, Stealthier and more Flexible an FTL type the more energy it should cost. The point here is to give a reason to do small raid like attacks with small detached groups, because the reduced logistical costs will be worth the losses these small groups will receive. Moving a Doom stack should be costly and moving it Fast or Stealthily should be so expensive that it's not economical to try to make a massive doom-stack surprise attack, you either attack fast with small groups or slowly with big groups. That means the defender has counter-play against a doom-stack, they can concentrate forces to intercept it the incoming attack or try to evade it and weaken the attacker by attrition mechanisms. Not to mention the defender is spending less resources too.

The cost of FTL ship components is just one area that I would use to balance on, not the only one. Much of the cost is also opportunity cost in ship VOLUME, a warp vessel with fuel tanks is going to be sacrificing space that could have been armor/shields etc even if the tank is very cheap as a component the warp ship is going to have less punch. The owner of the faster and more flexible drives will need to use that advantage to overcome opponents who will likely have stronger raw fleet power but thats good cause we want to move away from raw power as the sole measure of who will win and towards a design where 'strategy' matters too.

 

[Riftwalker]

I said explicitly that opportunity cost is important, that's why I have consistently said FTL movement needs to cost energy.

that's not opportunity cost, that's expenditure, opportunity cost means you lose the ability to do 1 thing but gain the ability to do something else equally good.

 

[ImpalerWrG]

that's not opportunity cost, that's expenditure, opportunity cost means you lose the ability to do 1 thing but gain the ability to do something else equally good.

All expenditures have an opportunity cost, that's inherent in both concepts. When you make an expenditure you lessen your ability to make any OTHER expenditure and forgo thouse opportunities which need to be considered as costs of making the expenditure. in the case of fuel/energy costs to move a fleet, if I spend fuel to move my fleet North I have sacrificed the opportunity to move it South until I have rebuilt my fuel supply.

 

[ISitOnGnomes]

Actually their were more then that, In SC1 you had Zerg Nydus canal which was an instant point-2-point system. In SC2 Protoss DID in fact have a lot of warp options, one was a high tier spell, the other warp-in as at the time a unit is built, their were also 'cliff bypass' units added which were essentially a 3rd kind of movement, Terrans even had a unit that transformed from flying to walking. Your right that all races had access two 'basic' movement types of walk/fly but they tried to create as much additional diversity on top of thouse types to give uniqueness to them.

No there was 1 basic form of movement. Ground movement. That is the only form all three have for the first few minutes of a game. This forces you to guard your chokepoints to repel any initial attacks, as well as make you seek ways past enemy choke points. Then you gain access to new modes of travel that let you bypass those choke points, but they come with higher costs, limitations, or potential weaknesses. So you have the choice to go all in on flying/canals/whatever, or simply use them as a distraction to help your main force break through.

I'm sure if you played a version of SC where every unit could fly it wouldnt be nearly as interesting.

 

[Riftwalker]

All expenditures have an opportunity cost, that's inherent in both concepts. When you make an expenditure you lessen your ability to make any OTHER expenditure and forgo thouse opportunities which need to be considered as costs of making the expenditure. in the case of fuel/energy costs to move a fleet, if I spend fuel to move my fleet North I have sacrificed the opportunity to move it South until I have rebuilt my fuel supply.

Okay so the amount of opportunity cost an ftl type requires to be used is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the opportunity cost between each ftl choice.

 

[ISitOnGnomes]

All expenditures have an opportunity cost, that's inherent in both concepts. When you make an expenditure you lessen your ability to make any OTHER expenditure and forgo thouse opportunities which need to be considered as costs of making the expenditure. in the case of fuel/energy costs to move a fleet, if I spend fuel to move my fleet North I have sacrificed the opportunity to move it South until I have rebuilt my fuel supply.

This is already represented by the increased energy/mineral cost for undocking your fleet. I suppose you could make the argument that it should be more harsh, but I fail to see how you could argue it isn't there.

 

[LeanneKaos]

I mean like, Zuul can expand, even with a very different method, just as well as Humans can, but in stellaris wormholes > warp > hyperlanes. resource balance is always really bad, because it tends to make it "suck when under funded, but OP when funded" they never actually are balanced, it's just can you survive til it's pay'd off.

Earlier you said it wasn't about balance, now it is again... I'm getting whiplash here.

The general concept of 'strong early game, weak endgame' versus 'weak early game/strong endgame' (of which 'resource balance' is only a part, in the same way fleetcap is only 'a part' of getting rid of doomstacks) is a form of balance - albeit one that's trickier to work in if the design is founded on the principle of "everyone gets to the endgame. (But even there, it's far more intricate than "suck when underfunded OP when funded.") But I'm not sure why you're bringing it up in response to my post. 'Resource balance' was someone else's argument.

(Incidentally, before I realized I could build stations outside my own borders I was struggling harder at expanding with wormholes than even with hyperlanes... and I never could understand *why* I'm able to build them like that, it actually feels like an exploit so I tend not to use it anyway. Meanwhile, hyperlanes are actually losing their biggest weakness on the expansion front in the same update that's removing warp & wormhole. Letting them flow through systems they're not stopping in would also have helped. But these are solving problems they didn't seem to actually be concerned with while not really addressing the whole 'defense is too hard without chokepoints and fortifications' issue that they keep bringing up.)

ethos selection though, IS balanced, in that they each change how you play greatly, but these gameplay changes don't impact power all that much.

At least one of them is basically "you can't make any progress toward actual victory until you lose this ethos," and 3 of the related civics required 'special exceptions' for the war rules they're crafting - which is literally the same problem they cited about the different FTLs, just on a different scale. There are also a handful of clearly superior or clearly inferior options if you're into minmaxing.

The only thing really balanced about it is that it's 'just' a handful of standouts out of many so the unbalanced parts are easier to ignore. (And really, other than pacifist ethos and the three antidiplomatic civics they have only a minor impact on how I play. And I just *don't like* those 4 to begin with so I never play them anyway.)

 

[ImpalerWrG]

This is already represented by the increased energy/mineral cost for undocking your fleet. I suppose you could make the argument that it should be more harsh, but I fail to see how you could argue it isn't there.

Indeed a sharp increase in the dock/un-dock differential would be good. But a cost to actually move a ship would give the defender an advantage by adding cost to the attacker, and it would keep war, exploration etc local for a bit longer in the game, both of which tend to get too global too fast in my opinion.

 

[Riftwalker]

The general concept of 'strong early game, weak endgame' versus 'weak early game/strong endgame' (of which 'resource balance' is only a part, in the same way fleetcap is only 'a part' of getting rid of doomstacks) is a form of balance

it's a bad one, because it causes the option never to feel actually balanced during play, only that it loses/wins about as often as others in the end game screen. the problem is it's suck or be broken. i'm not saying it isn't a balancing point, i'm saying this is a bad one, as individual power struggles between empires wouldn't be balanced, just the overall win/lose ratio. in general you don't want scenarios where you're starting to be guaranteed victory or loss based on some bad or good RNG.

as for the balance thing, I think balance is a bad word to describe what i mean. I mean that all the options provide different tactics and don't all overly emphasize a part of the game. they're all different and are all viable choices. in stellaris, hyperlane simply wasn't viable in an all FTL match, it also tended to make federations impossible to coordinate because all the FTLs had vastly different 'speeds'. Meanwhile in SotS, you generally kept up with everyone. their opportunity cost in general wasn't speed or resources. Hivers are an exception with them being slow to start but then very quick in their own territory, however they have the best sublight speeds because of this as well.

At least one of them is basically "you can't make any progress toward actual victory until you lose this ethos," and 3 of the related civics required 'special exceptions' for the war rules they're crafting - which is literally the same problem they cited about the different FTLs, just on a different scale. There are also a handful of clearly superior or clearly inferior options if you're into minmaxing.

which one? pacifist? only fanatic requires you to have people DoW on you, insult people and set them up as tributaries, it counts for domination victory.

I'm not sure you've actually tried to win with all the ethos because it's fairly easy to do with all of them. at least on normal, not sure what shenanigans are required on high difficulties.

to me, it's mostly the factions that cause me to change how i play between the various ethos.

 

[LeanneKaos]

it's a bad one, because it causes the option never to feel actually balanced during play, only that it loses/wins about as often as others in the end game screen. the problem is it's suck or be broken.

That's really not been my general experience with it, but here's clearly no point trying to explain. I mean, this wasn't even originally my point but you stuffed it in my mouth anyway, and previously you've repeated something I already said right back at me like it was something new. So it's pretty obvious whatever I say is moot.

as for the balance thing, I think balance is a bad word to describe what i mean. I mean that all the options provide different tactics and don't all overly emphasize a part of the game. they're all different and are all viable choices. in stellaris, hyperlane simply wasn't viable in an all FTL match, it also tended to make federations impossible to coordinate because all the FTLs had vastly different 'speeds'.

Which would be nothing more than a mild irritant at worst (which is what trying to 'coordinate' with AI always is anyway) if it weren't for the "doomstack or GTFO" problem making anyone who can't 'keep up' basically irrelevant. And guess what else Cherryh is trying to do?

It's almost funny; unless their solution to doomstacks explicitly relies on hyperlanes, the update that does away with warp and wormhole is incidentally fixing a good chunk of the problems that made hyperlane "not viable' in an all-FTL scenario. (But again, it doesn't fix their real bugbear: making warfare more like land wars in asia than naval battles on the open sea, so it doesn't matter.)

Meanwhile in SotS, you generally kept up with everyone.

...
Not even close in terms of ship speed. But I imagine pointing that out will just result in being told you meant it in a different way so whatever.

which one? pacifist? only fanatic requires you to have people DoW on you, insult people and set them up as tributaries, it counts for domination victory.

I'm not sure you've actually tried to win with all the ethos because it's fairly easy to do with all of them. at least on normal, not sure what shenanigans are required on high difficulties.

to me, it's mostly the factions that cause me to change how i play between the various ethos.

To me, factions are largely just an excuse to shift my bonuses... er ethos after the game has started. At the price of putting up with their insistent demands I do completely stupid things or lose half my influence income. Maybe that's not 'high level play' in the context of Paradox games and it's holding me back from doing 'better,' but years of playing Civ instead of EU have left me with strong "play the map not the tribe" instincts.

 

[Riftwalker]

That's really not been my general experience with it, but here's clearly no point trying to explain. I mean, this wasn't even originally my point but you stuffed it in my mouth anyway,

omo

that's why i brought it up though. I first brought it up in relation to @ImpalerWrG. so if you brought it up for a different reason when replying to me, i was still using their context.

It's almost funny; unless their solution to doomstacks explicitly relies on hyperlanes, the update that does away with warp and wormhole is incidentally fixing a good chunk of the problems that made hyperlane "not viable' in an all-FTL scenario. (But again, it doesn't fix their real bugbear: making warfare more like land wars in asia than naval battles on the open sea, so it doesn't matter.)

it's almost impossible to catch a fleet that uses warp or wormhole with a hyperlane fleet. regardless of how doomstacky they are. you have to wait for them to land in a system they want to do something in, but if they can warp out, you're twiddling your thumbs.

Not even close in terms of ship speed. But I imagine pointing that out will just result in being told you meant it in a different way so whatever.

interception was pretty easy in SotS, except for maybe hivers and humans/zuul who couldn't obviously.

To me, factions are largely just an excuse to shift my bonuses... er ethos after the game has started. At the price of putting up with their insistent demands I do completely stupid things or lose half my influence income. Maybe that's not 'high level play' in the context of Paradox games and it's holding me back from doing 'better,' but years of playing Civ instead of EU have left me with strong "play the map not the tribe" instincts.

I seem to manage non-empire ethic factions pretty well in my games. so long as i'm not forced to not pick a policy by the ethos anyway.

 

[anomanderus]

NOTE: A Moderator has merged all FTL threads, and this one ended up being the OP.

Let's not kid ourselves by saying the changes Wiz announced aren't among the better options for FTL in the game, but it is still upsetting that we're losing the cool flavor of being an empire based around the wormhole, or around the warp drive. To that end, I would like to make a suggestion to compensate for their loss: adding the ability to choose an FTL aesthetic. Basically all three FTL systems would work exactly the same as hyperlanes, except you would see the animation for charging warp drives or preparing a wormhole (without the need for a station in this iteration). It's simple and would give us a way to say we "kind of" still have warp and wormholes.

In an effort to give this thought more reason to exist (and to bump this back up to the top :3), maybe there could also be a slight difference between the warm up and cooldown timers of each FTL type. Like Warp could have more cooldown than warmup, Hyperspace could have equal parts of both, and Wormholes could have more warmup than cooldown. Not a meaningful difference but would be a difference and could still adhear to the current hyperlane ideal

Mod Edit:
In order to prevent this forum from getting flooded with threads discussing the same topic, all FTL discussion will now take place here.

Until further notice you may only discuss FTL here and in any Dev Diary that directly mentions it in the dev diary itself. All other FTL threads will be merged with this one.

Thanks,
Mr.C

What exactly do you mean "let's not kid ourselves?". Absolutely none of the changes he's making will fix combat in this game. The only thing stellaris is good at is the only thing paradox originally envisaged it to be which was "our game has lots of stuff from a bunch of different scifi universes- we even named the developer diaries after a bunch of different authors of scifi works to reflect that! Customization is king!". What is currently happening is a poor attempt to remove stuff and splice in ideas from other games which specifically focused on space combat during their pre-launch development. You cannot make Stellaris space combat into Sins of a Solar Empire combat now because Stellaris has already launched. What you will make is a frankenstein's monster of a game where the developers went into it thinking that they wanted it to be a lovesong for all the great scifi out there and then later decided to change their minds a year and a half after they had already launched it. None of this will work.

And this is ignoring the part where space fortresses are supposed to apparently be an impediment guarding hyperlanes and preventing you from advancing as though you were moving along the surface of a planet like the forts in EU4, but hyperspace and hyperlanes do not work that way in fiction and you should be able to bypass them anyway. It effectively removes all the actual "space" from this supposed space-game and just makes it more like a space-themed mod for a game focused on terrestrial combat.

And frankly I don't see the point of this pinned thread, the developers are unlikely to stop their push to remove features people paid for more than a year ago- do they think if they give me a space to complain I'll forget? Especially after the latest dev diary. Also I haven't forgotten that sectors are still terrible yet apparently that doesn't warrant anyone's attention and has also been dismissed to a "containment" thread despite sectors having been a sore point since day 1.

I felt the same way initially, I personally never really liked hyperlanes and only used them when I felt like making use of military stations. However, I am willing to sacrifice some things for the sake of a more interesting warfare system which is a core element of the game. I almost always play empires that conquer others just because diplomacy is also lacking and sitting still for 200 years waiting for end game crisis in incredibly boring to me.

HOWEVER. As it stands war is also boring and a mindless effort. If that can be fixed by changing starting tech thats fine by me!

Having played a bunch of hyperlanes games recently to see if I could stomach these new changes I can say that playing with hyperlanes is awful and also clashes with the game's mechanics. The stupid "find the ancient aliens homeworld" quests become less of a fun early-mid game thing and more of a terrible tedious grind when you have to go halfway across the galaxy asking every dumb alien along the way for access, which takes time since all of them tend to start out with those nice big maluses due to being recently discovered.

Hyperlanes only can only really work if you remove a bunch of anomalies from the early game, since the early game is so heavily focused on exploration but hyperlanes only with alien neighbors who almost always close their borders until they stop distrusting you slows exploration to a crawl.

Perhaps the only good change being made is that aliens can't conquer worlds halfway across the galaxy which will hopefully be implemented correctly and prevent idiot alien xenophobes who are separated by another alien empire from declaring war on the empire in between us and then specifically grabbing a world in the peace treaty which happens to border me, then declaring war on me and because of hyperlanes neither of us can actually get at each other. But then again all that really displays is that the idiotic rival system is fundamentally broken, just like the option to have advanced AI start away from you, since every dumb hostile alien in the galaxy always wants to rival you.

omo

that's why i brought it up though. I first brought it up in relation to @ImpalerWrG. so if you brought it up for a different reason when replying to me, i was still using their context.



it's almost impossible to catch a fleet that uses warp or wormhole with a hyperlane fleet. regardless of how doomstacky they are. you have to wait for them to land in a system they want to do something in, but if they can warp out, you're twiddling your thumbs.



interception was pretty easy in SotS, except for maybe hivers and humans/zuul who couldn't obviously.



I seem to manage non-empire ethic factions pretty well in my games. so long as i'm not forced to not pick a policy by the ethos anyway.

And the answer to wormholes and warp space enabling free movement would have been to get creative or read scifi where stellar countermeasures are created to combat aliens who work that way. Instead the apparent solution is to remove them completely.

And this is also ignoring you can literally just not play with hyperlanes as things currently are, or not play with the other forms of FTL. Why are people so helpless to just turn off the features they don't like in the game start menu? It's right there, the buttons which control this, yet the people who support removing features conveniently go deaf, dumb and blind when you point this out.

 

[Shadeseraph]

I've been thinking a bit, and I kind of notice that the new claims + war weariness system would be rather good at forcing people to split their armies in the current environment. I mean, currently the issue is that with war goals what you conquer is completely unrelated to what you get (and actually, leaving the planets you want to get alone is a good idea, because that way you get them with all ther buildings and space constructions intact), and as the main attacker you can usually afford to let the weaker side do his thing because you have all the time to retake whatever you lose.

With the Status quo peace, however, protecting systems that the enemy has claimed becomes important, because even if you have the more powerful fleet, if he manages to raise your war weariness high enough you might end losing more than what you won... And in the same way, attacks in multiple fronts become more interesting, especially if you can grind the enemies' war weariness down through skirmishing attacks. The AI would have to be thoroughly reworked, though

In this sense, the idea of starbases as a way to protect multiple high priority systems (with the "warp redirector" thingie) becomes a nice addition, without having to rely on "bubblewrapping" your empire with defenses. There is still the issue of drawing wormhole ships outside of range, so there's that.

 

[Kult der Krähe]

And this is also ignoring you can literally just not play with hyperlanes as things currently are, or not play with the other forms of FTL. Why are people so helpless to just turn off the features they don't like in the game start menu? It's right there, the buttons which control this, yet the people who support removing features conveniently go deaf, dumb and blind when you point this out.

This is what I don't understand as well. Why on earth would anyone support the removal of features that people use and enjoy when there are already options that exist to pick and choose which features to use already there? The FtL types aren't balanced with each other? Why, there's already an option in-game that limits the galaxy to only one FtL type of choice ("choice" being the key word), so all civilizations or players (in the event of multiplayer) are now balanced with each other. Want a hyperlane-only game? Click, click, click, there. Now you have a hyperlane-only game that you can enjoy, without taking the fun away from those of us that prefer warp and wormhole, and the gameplay styles necessitated by how they function.

Want a game that resembles land warfare, with choke points and static defenses? Pick hyperlane. Want a game where fleets could pop up anywhere, and the best defense is mobility? Pick wormhole. It isn't a hard concept to wrap one's head around.

I really don't understand the reasoning, at all, for taking these things away.

 

[Seb_Jean]

I really don't understand the reasoning, at all, for taking these things away.

Reasoning is simple, they had limited resources and wanted to implement a new way to play this game and the current FTL system needed too much work to realize their vision. I'm surprised that people still argue about this when the devs clearly said why. I was upset at first but I won't cry about the loss of Wormhole and warp. Some people here act like it was the only reason they had to play this game...

 

[Tavior]

Reasoning is simple, they had limited resources and wanted to implement a new way to play this game and the current FTL system needed too much work to realize their vision. I'm surprised that people still argue about this when the devs clearly said why. I was upset at first but I won't cry about the loss of Wormhole and warp. Some people here act like it was the only reason they had to play this game...

There are other indie that manage to pull off non-hyperlane movement system like Sword of the Stars for one at day one.

 

[Seb_Jean]

There are other indie that manage to pull off non-hyperlane movement system like Sword of the Stars for one at day one.

Maybe but that's not the decision Stellaris devs made. I don't see the point in arguing about something or a decision that won't change.

 

[Obak]

Maybe but that's not the decision Stellaris devs made. I don't see the point in arguing about something or a decision that won't change.

Because without discusding it, it certainly wont change.